NEO is a blockchain platform and cryptocurrency which enables the development of digital assets and smart contracts. The project is based in China and was originally launched in 2014 as AntShares. NEO uses a delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (dBFT) consensus mechanism and can support up to 10,000 transactions per second. NEO tokens can be staked to produce GAS tokens which are used as the fuel of the platform, to pay for computation or deployment of smart contracts within the NEO network. The project was founded by Da Hongfei.

NEO nodes use Byzantine Fault Tolerance Algorithm (dBFT) to reach consensus and ensure the finality of transactions. It also ensures that the system keeps its finality and availability as long as Byzantine fault occurs on less than 1/3 of the nodes. With the use of dBFT protocol, NEO practical transaction speed is 1,000 TPS and theoretically can reach 10,000 TPS in future.

NeoContract, the NEO smart contract system, supports multiple programming languages such as C#, Java, and Python. Developers can rapidly develop smart contracts based on the NEO platform without learning a new language.

The platform includes 2 different tokens – NEO and GAS. NEO represents the right to manage the network, including voting for consensus nodes and making decisions for the blockchain. GAS is used to pay for all the service fees on the blockchain, e.g. creation and launching of smart contracts.

In the genesis block of the NEO network, 100 million NEO tokens were created. 50 million of them are on the account and over time, they will be used for the development of the Neo ecosystem. Other 50 million are distributed among the ICO participants according to the pre-developed mechanism. The total amount of NEO tokens is 100 million and cannot be increased. The smallest NEO unit is 1 NEO and cannot be divided.

GAS is initially generated with the speed of 8 tokens for each new block in the blockchain. The production speed decreases for 1 token per every 2 million generated blocks untill it is down to 1 GAS per block. Approximately in 22 years, the volume of GAS will reach 100 million and its generation will stop. These GAS will be distributed proportionally in accordance with the NEO holding ratio and recorded in the corresponding addresses. NEO holders can initiate a claim transaction at any time and claim these GAS tokens at their holding addresses. Unlike NEO, GAS can be divided. The minimum unit of GAS is 0.00000001.